UberRUSH Shuts Down Restaurant Delivery

Food delivery has long been an excellent idea often limited to the urban dweller, but there have been increasing moves geared toward making that more available, in both more places and from more restaurants than was previously seen.

Uber’s courier arm, UberRUSH, handled such a function for a while, but a recent organizational change is taking food delivery off the table…at least, for UberRUSH.

The reports paint a simple reason for the change: excessive redundancy. Essentially, the drivers handling duties for UberRUSH were part of the standard Uber pool. This meant that, around mealtimes, Uber saw a driver shortage because too many of its regular drivers were handling food courier duties.

Now, reports note, Uber will be devoting the UberEATS pool to food delivery, which means that UberEATS and UberRUSH won’t be cannibalizing the market any further.

UberRUSH, meanwhile, will be more closely detailed to logistics and delivery operations for non-prepared food markets like grocery stores, as well as groups like florists. UberEATS will focus on food going forward.

Really, it’s a smart point; why detail the UberRUSH drivers to food delivery when UberEATS is in place? That’s just a drain on the overall driver pool, and one that Uber really can’t afford in an environment where it’s already under fire on all sides anyway for several different reasons.

Uber needs to have drivers enough to meet demand, and if it’s got some of its RUSH drivers working on EATS turf, along with current duties, that’s just going to drive down the pool. Making EATS drivers focus on food and RUSH drivers focus on non-food (and sometimes food with grocery delivery) should help free up more drivers for the mealtime rushes.

While this may seem like meaningless deck-shuffling to some, the end result should make Uber overall a more responsive company that offers a better customer experience. Though it does sort of put a crimp in the notion of food delivery by mobile just about anywhere, that’s a point that’s being worked on elsewhere as well, and shouldn’t be too restricted with all the new developments coming up.